Текст книги "Inheritor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Knowing Ilisidi’s general penchant for intrigue, however, either they were being gotten out for the day so that the cooking aromas wouldn’t betray the surprise, or something was damn sure going on. He looked out past the crowd at a vast rolling grassland, gravelly ground with tough clumps of vegetation that grew in what might be quite a fragile ecology, up here on the ocean bluffs.

One of those national hunting reserves, to look at it. Atevi wouldn’t eat commercially produced meat. There were immense tracts where no one built, no rail crossed, no one disturbed the land.

Perimeter alarms. Electronic fences. This place.

Had they ever notified the boy’s parents, Bren asked himself, shortening his focus to the crowd ahead. Had anyonewho might worry any idea the boy was with them?

He doubted it, the way he began to be concerned that there was something specifically afoot that had taken away Tano and Algini. From the steps, a head count turned up fourteen of Ilisidi’s young men besides hissmall party.

He had brought in his luggage the gun he very illegally owned—under Treaty law that forbade the paidhi to carry a weapon, a gun that wasTabini’s gift—and Banichi’s. He hadn’t dared leave it in the apartment with uncle Tatiseigi staying there; finding that in the bureau drawer would have sent the old man through the highly ornate ceiling. But he had tucked it into his baggage for safe-keeping, knowing his luggage never had to go through a security check. He’d never believed he’d need it on this outing and now he wished he dared go back inside to get it from his luggage, not that he knew what he’d want it for, but everybody else but himself and Jase, the boy from Dur, and the dowager herself, was armed.

Wind battered them, sweeping off the sea, across heights broken not even by a fence. Jase was cold, clearly, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets. The wind whipped his hair. He looked up and scowled into the gusts with the cheerfulness with which he might gaze into an enemy’s face.

As a snort and a squall broke out from around the corner of the building.

Mechieti.

The huge, black creatures came around the corner, high-shouldered, massive in the forequarters.

Mechieti, the riding beasts that had carried atevi across the continent, that had carried them into war and on their explorations. Mechieti were vegetarian, mostly. But Jase stepped back up on the porch steps, and he thought about his own safety for the space of a heartbeat before pride made him stand his ground. They were a herd into which only their regular riders walked with assurance. Ilisidi’s men started sorting the throng out, as the riders, three in number, who had brought the herd around to the steps added to the company of Ilisidi’s men.

“You’ll have the same mechieta as last time, I think,” he said to Jase, who was glum and apprehensive of the whole affair. “Watch the nose. Remember?” Those blunt teeth on the lower jaw, the length of a human hand, could kill a man quite messily, or knock a novice stupidly flat on his back if he was fool enough to press down on the nose of an animal that regularly rooted up its food.

He counted himself still fortunate to have survived his own initial mistake with the beasts unscarred, and he had warned Jase half a year ago: those rooting tusks were blunt-capped to protect potential riders from being disemboweled in their ordinary herd behavior.

And if they fought, and this band had, a different kind of cap, war-brass, went on those tusks to make them sharp as knives.

“Nand’ paidhi.” One of Ilisidi’s young men came to the steps to take charge of Jase, specifically. “Please come with me. Follow closely.”

“Remember to keep your foot back,” Bren called after him. Some mechieti learned that feet were in reach of a bite. Jase’s mount the last time had come close to succeeding; and he never gave odds that his own twice-upon-a-time mount, Nokhada (his own, by generous gift of the dowager) would disdain such a nasty trick.

But he was excited. He had looked forward to a ride during this trip as his own enjoyment, far more than any fishing trip, and he was prepared to enjoy it if he could keep Jase from mortal injury. He was anxious to find Nokhada and renew acquaintances, and, thinking he’d spotted her, he went a little into the herd and whistled.

“Nokhada!” he called out, as riders called to their mounts. “Hada, hada, hada!”

The head turned, an eye observed, and with the surly inevitability of a landslide the neck followed, the body turned, and the whole beast moved—checked for a moment by another moving mountain.

Then, with an ill-tempered squeal that thundered against the eardrums, Nokhada didremember him and shoved her way through the others with such energy that one of Ilisidi’s men had to pull his mechieta back to avoid a fight.

Prudence might have said to go for the steps. He stood his ground and Nokhada shoved and butted him in the chest, smelled him over and then rubbed her poll against his shoulder, prompting a human who’d been laid out flat and stunned once to step to the side and jerk smartly on the single rein to get that huge, tusked, and devoted head out of the way of his face.

The head came up, which indeed would have knocked him a body-length away if not sent him to the hospital, and then as the whole herd shifted, he was in danger of being squeezed between Nokhada and Cenedi’s mount. He instantly lifted his riding crop, putting it end-on between Nokhada’s shoulder and the oncoming mass. The steel-centered, braided leather crop stood the impact and shied the two apart again: it was a trick he’d learned his last trip out, it worked; and he jerked on the long, loose rein, which had one end fastened on Nokhada’s jaw-piece and the other end slip-tied to a ring on the saddle, to get Nokhada to lower her body for a mount-up in the bawling chaos that was their setting-forth.

They were working out an agreement, he and she, or he was getting better at it. Nokhada extended a foreleg, and the other side of that getting better at itwas his speed in tugging the rein’s slipknot free of the restraining ring, getting hold of the saddle and being ready when Nokhada heaved upward with a powerful snap that pitched her rider up with the same force.

The stopping of said force allowed the rider, at apogee, to subside into the saddle if the rider had aimed himself appropriately at the seat and not to the side.

He had. Jase—was making the mount he’d made when he’d begun, being boosted up and into the saddle of a standing animal. Banichi was up; so was Jago, and the boy, last, who made a mount like Jase’s, and made a wild snatch after the rein.

At that point Nokhada made an unsignaled full about turn and used that momentary inattention to get more rein and start her way toward the front of the column.

Ilisidi was on the steps, and came down to her mechieta, Babsidi, who held sole possession of the area around him: mechiet’-aiji, herd-leader. Babsidi came to the steps, and at a genteel tap of Ilisidi’s riding crop extended a leg as Ilisidi tucked her cane into a holster made for it and stepped aboard, coordinating her step and Babsidi’s rise with a grandeur no machimi actor he had ever seen achieved. This wasa rider. This wasthe rider of this animal, for all the years of his dominance over the herd and hers over her followers. This was real; and a human found his breath stuck in his throat as Ilisidi brought Babsidi about, every other mechieta following and adjusting position, and tons of muscle moving as one creature.

Bren took tight grip on the single rein and held Nokhada hard from advancing, twisting her head as much as her long neck permitted. He pulled her full about and let her straighten out. He could see Jase, whose mechieta Jarani was one of the lower-rank mechieti, a quieter beast which wouldn’t put him to a contest for the lead and which wouldn’t lose him, either; the boy from Dur had a similarly quiet beast, so he trusted. But Cenedi’s mechieta, who was second in the herd, and Nokhada, who thought she should be, were the two principle difficulties in the whole herd. Cenedi, used to being by Ilisidi, stayed with her. But Nokhada, if ridden, would try to get next to Babs if it killed her rider. He kept a tight rein.

Jase struggled just to keep his balance. He’d been chancy half a year ago and he seemed no abler at balance in the saddle after half a year on the world’s surface. He held on with both hands; and Bren reined Nokhada in that direction, able to do so, and, he admitted it, showing off and fiercely proud of it.

Jase was not happy.

“If I die on this ride,” Jase said, “I hope you can handle the manuals.”

“You won’t die.—Foot! Watch it.”

Jase tucked it out of convenient reach of Jarani, who, frustrated in his aim, sidled over and bared teeth at Nokhada.

Nokhada ripped upward with the tusks at Jarani’s shoulder, who returned the favor half-heartedly, and for a moment there was a sort-out all around them; but Jarani gave ground and ducked and bobbed his head as mechieti would who’d just been outmuscled by one of their kind.

“Damn it!” Jase said, shaken and mistakenly trying to prevent that head movement.

Meanwhile Banichi and Jago had moved to be near both of them, theirsecurity in a cluster of Ilisidi’s young men.

“Where’s Tano and Algini?” he asked finally, having something like privacy in the squalling confusion.

“On duty,” was all Banichi said, meaning ask no further.

So presumably they were staying behind to guard the gear, or the premises, or were catching sleep in preparation for going on a round the clock alternation with Banichi and Jago.

Which sometimes happened. And from which he might take warning. All hell might break loose here before they got back—and their leaving might be a ploy to get the paidhiin to safety. They mighthave learned something from the boy that Banichi wasn’t saying.

Ilisidi started them moving, not at a walk, but at least not at a breakneck run, toward the gap in the low fence by which the vans had come in. At that moderate pace Nokhada had no difficulty reaching the front; but even with Jase and the boy from Dur trailing them there was no chance of losing them. Putting a prisoner or a guest atop an associated mechieta was the best way in the world to guarantee that individual stayed in sight and placed himself wherever the herd-status of that particular mechieta encouraged it to travel. You couldn’t leave unridden ones behind, either; they’d follow at the expense of any structure that confined them, breaking down rails or battering through gates, and injuring themselves if they couldn’t.

Man’chi. In its most primitive evocation.

At Malguri he’d seen his first primitive model of the behavior and as a human being achieved his first gut-level understanding, with Nokhada under him battling to keep up, risking life and limb—primal need that had roused enough primal fear of falling and enough personal response to that ton of desperate muscle and bone carrying him at a frantic pace that he’d had no trouble feelingthe emotional pitch. His heart still beat harder when he recalled that first chase. He’dbeen damned glad to have caught up to Ilisidi and not to have broken his neck; all through that long ride he’d been glad to catch up to Ilisidi, and he’d learned to think, gut-level, of the niche Nokhada wanted as the safest place he could be without even realizing the mechanics of what was going on in either the mechieta or in him: the mechieta going to its leader and the primate finding a safe limb, thank you, both at the same destination.

They still had some unridden mechieti with them today; but they were carrying equipment, canvas bundles.

What’s that for? he asked himself.

But he had no answer, and didn’t figure the paidhi was going to find out from his own security, not without bringing him into play, where hissecurity didn’t want him to be.

So they maintained his ignorance for his protection and Jase’s, he feared. And they held their sedate gait, good enough riders to keep Jarani and Nokhada together, by urging Jarani and getting in Nokhada’s path, while he was getting good enough at least that he wouldn’t let Nokhada have the piece of Jarani’s hide that Nokhada, by her little tensions and shiftings under his legs, wanted. The single rein always seemed to him small restraint to the mountain of an animal she was, but taps of the riding crop for some reason distracted her from mayhem, possibly because earlier in her life an ateva arm had wielded it, or just that she paid attention to her rider naturally.

And he was getting better at doing it at the precise instant it had most effect, too, which he had discovered to be right before she started to do something overt. Thatrequired a rider reading those little muscle twitches and the set of her ears and tapping her hard enough to get her attention.

Jase, however, who had ridden once, from the landing site to Taiben, was clinging with both hands to the saddle, not doing much with the rein, which was a good thing. He bumped about like a sack of laundry, and was probably annoying hell out of Jarani.

But this was the man who found a window-seat on an airplane a challenge to his sense of balance.

“Relax the spine,” he said to Jase. “You won’t fall. Relax.”

Jase tried. It was difficult for him, but he tried.

And at this speed there wasn’t a tendency for the herd to form into hierarchical order: individual mechieti dipped heads unexpectedly, snatched bits of green. Which scared Jase when it happened.

“Relax.”

Jase’s hands were, in fact, white-knuckled, and Jase’s mouth was a thin, straight line as Jarani took a snap at another mechieta moving up on them from the rear. That mechieta nipped back, and Jarani bumped Nokhada in sheer surprise.

The boy from Dur drew close, or his mechieta did: he was clearly another non-rider. He appeared to have notions what to do, but he wasn’t winning the argument; and his mechieta shied into Banichi’s, who gave it a head toss that was audible on impact.

“I’m sorry, nandi, I’m sorry.”

“Rein!” Banichi said, and the boy tried, to the inconvenience of all around him as he mis-signaled and sent the well-trained creature off to the side.

Hewas better than that, Bren thought, with perhaps too much pride; but he patted Nokhada’s hard shoulder and quietly gave Jase instruction what to do with the rein and with his feet.

And his spine. “Sit easy—easier than that,” he said. “Dammit, Jase– tryto fall off!”

Jase looked at him as if he’d misunderstood.

“Try,” he said syllable by syllable, “to fall off. You can’t. You’re balanced. Relax, dammit. Rock. Sway. Do it!”

Jase sucked in a breath and let go his death-grip on the saddle. And leaned a little one way, and then the other. And gave another deep breath.

Banichi, damn him, crooked an easy leg across the saddle front, watched the performance, and grinned.

“Better,” Banichi said. There was nothing in the entire universe that Banichi, who stood solid and square as a wall, could not do, and do gracefully. And Banichi laughed, waved his riding crop at the boy from Dur. “You listen to the paidhi, nadi. Sit like a living creature, not like a load of baggage.”

Then—then for some reason unannounced—the pace increased.

And increased, until mechieti were moving together, almost in unison, stride for stride. Bren looked back as the old fortress fell behind them.

He saw, from the angle they’d achieved in their riding away, the back of the building and vans parked there, maybe six, seven of them.

Damn, he thought. He shortened his focus to Jago riding close behind him, and knew she knew and no one was talking. They were headed upslope, now, up the general pitch of the rolling, fragile sod, on which a little brush grew, but not much, and never a tree. They were out here in an area reminiscent of riding the ridge at Malguri, climbing, and climbing.

He thought of the bluffs that overlooked the sea, and the installation of Mogari-nai that sat atop them.

He thought of the boundary out there beyond the horizon, that invisible demarcation of sea and air that marked where Mospheira began. They were moving toward it. He didn’t think by the direction they were going they’d come in view of it. But they would come close.

And the speed and smoothness with which the mechieti traveled even walking in this grassy, open land was something he’d never felt in the rough land around Malguri. It was wonderful, a traveling pace that let even Jase find his sense of the rhythm in the movement. The boy from Dur gave up holding on and rode easily in the saddle.

And slowly, inexorably, predictibly, Nokhada lengthened stride and came closer and closer to Ilisidi and Cenedi. Banichi and Jago moved with him, up through the herd.

There was never a word said. Ilisidi, a competition rider, rode with that easy grace that put them all to shame, and Babsidi’s long strides challenged all of them that followed her, reminding them that Babsidi wasquality, from his finely shaped head to his powerful rump. No one got ahead of Babsidi. And Nokhada’s joy was dampened only by the presence of Cenedi’s mechieta, her chief rival, who alwayshad a rider, an entitlement of some kind Bren had never figured out. Unridden, Nokhada hung back and caused no trouble; with him aboard, she aspired, that was all, she aspired to the front line—and made her rider feel guilty that he was so seldom there.

But he had no idea, absolutely no idea what drove her, or whether she’d been glad to see him when she recognized him after an absence or whether her fierce mechieta heart just saw justification for raising hell. He patted her shoulder. It got a flick of the ears; but no understanding of her. He said to himself he had to arrange to ride more often, somehow.

Among other dreams.

The mind could grow quiet, watching that motion, hearing the noise of mechieti at that comfortable pace all about them. Watching that horizon. Watching the shadows that had been in front of them slowly, slowly overtake them until the sun beat down on their heads.

Then Ilisidi took the group to a slower pace, and to a stop. Jase caught up to him for the first time in over an hour, and Jase had done it—had stayed on, had even, with encouragement from the riding crop and his feet and the rein, gotten Jarani to move through the crowd.

“Good for you,” Bren said as they sat on the hard-breathing mechieti. “How are you doing?”

“Alive,” Jase said, and seemed to be in pain.

Jago and Banichi moved up close. Meanwhile two of the men had slid down and were getting one of the mechieti to kneel, to let them reach the pack it carried.

“Do we go back now?” Jase asked.

“Not yet,” Banichi said; and the men hastily getting into the pack had come out with a bag of sandwiches, which they passed about, beginning with the dowager.

They ate the sandwiches, and the mechieti under them grazed the sparse vegetation, and wandered as they grazed, taking them in whatever direction or association the mechieti chose. They never got down. Canteens were an ordinary part of their equipment, and they drank. After that, the men afoot adjusted the canvas on the one pack they’d gotten into, remounted, and Ilisidi started moving again.

Not back toward the fortress, but dead ahead as they’d been bearing.

They’d started at dawn, they were going on past noon—they weren’t going to be back by dark, that became clear as they kept going.

But now that Jase failed to besiege him with questions he began to have questions of his own, no longer wherethey were going: that was, he suspected almost beyond question, eventually, Mogari-nai.

Why should they be going there? Considering the contingent of vans that had moved in behind them, coupled with Tano’s and Algini’s absence, he had a notion, too, of that answer: that Tabini-aiji was not pleased with the establishment at Mogari-nai, or the Messengers’ Guild.

Dared the aiji take on a Guild, and what would happen if he did? The Astronomers had fallen from highest of all the Guilds when they’d misinterpreted the Foreign Star, when the ship had appeared in the heavens the first time and slowly built the station. In the time when the Astronomers had predicted the future, they had entirely failed to know the nature of their universe, and they had fallen.

Possibly the Messengers had failed to know the nature of theiruniverse, and the aiji had resolved to see that his messages flowed accurately. But to take on the Messengers when the political situation was so difficult and so fraught with trouble, with Direiso urging his overthrow and Hanks and her radio broadcasting to atevi small aircraft.

Yet there it was, if he thought about it. The radio.. Another communicationsproblem: another problem that could be laid right in the Messengers’ laps. Radio traffic was a problem of which the Messengers were in charge, which Mogari-nai could have heard, especially situated where they were, near the coast.

If there were difficulty with one Guild, what other Guilds would stand by the aiji most firmly? What Guilds hadstood most firmly by the aiji? The Mathematicians—and the Assassins.

Direiso had benefit in that illicit radio. Shewould stand by the Messengers, if they were turning a blind eye to the problem.

The government had potential difficulties up here. And Banichi and Jago weren’t saying a thing.

Maybe it was Ilisidi’s orders. He had the sudden sinking feeling Ilisidi had found their vacation a fine excuse to be out here, and the paidhiin might be superfluous to her intentions to visit Mogari-nai.

Certainly Jase was.

But dammit, there were things he needed to know too. And he was going to find out, if they could just shake loose some answers.

19

It was a long, long ride at a fair clip after that. Nokhada disliked eating dust and fought to get forward, which Bren fought to prevent, not wishing to leave Jase alone, even if the spacing necessary to the mechieti for their sheer body size made conversation difficult.

That meant that the strangers to Ilisidi’s company all rode in a knot that strung out at times, but never broke entirely apart so long as Bren kept a tight rein on Nokhada, who eventually seemed to resign herself to the notion that due to some failure of ambition or temporary insanity on her rider’s part they were not going to dash forward and attempt to occupy the same space as Cenedi’s mechieta—for maybe this little while.

Ilisidi, meanwhile, ignored them to hold consultation with the armed young men who took her orders, and one or the other would fall back to the rear guard. Bren kept glancing at the horizons, asking himself what was going on. There was no recourse to the pocket coms, nothing to indicate any problem. But something had changed.

There was a wicked, angry streak in this woman, not just in a human opinion but in twospecies’ ways of looking at it. Ilisidi had been genial at the dinner last night; that was the velvet over the steel. Ilisidi was the gracious lady, the lame old woman—and the aristocrat, lord of her scaffold-supported hall. She’d arranged that crystal-laden table simply because it was difficult, and because her staff, too, did the impossible at her whim.

This morning she’d ceased to make things difficult for her staff and, astride Babsidi, whose four strong legs carried her with more speed, agility and strength than any man alive, she began to make things difficult for them. It was her way of saying to the world, he began to think, Those who follow mehave to follow at disadvantage and difficulty. It was the condition of her life. She was notaiji. But those who served her treated her wishes as if she were.

And to the powers around Tabini she said, When you who rejected meas aiji suddenly want my help, damn you all, you’ll bleed for it.

So the aiji’s security (along with the paidhiin, who were excused from the normal considerations of man’chi and courtesies due, but not from the suffering part of it) didn’t get full information from her, either: they were simply supposed to follow in blind obedience whenever fortune and chance, those devils of Tabini’s designs, put his agents temporarily under her instructions.

That was one way Bren summed it up, having seen it in operation at Malguri and again in the Padi Valley.

Or possibly it was nothing of retribution on Tabini at all.

Perhaps it was just the native style of the old-fashioned, unabashed atevi autocrat she was—as old-fashioned in some ways as the fortress of Malguri off in the east—to make them follow her only under her terms.

As if, ateva to the core, she provedthe direction not only of the man’chi of the mechieti she lent them, but that of the men she led.

Bren reasoned his way to that precarious point, while slowly stretching muscles he only used when he skied and when he rode, and bruising points of contact he onlycontacted when he rode. He’d asked for it. He’d asked for it for good reasons, but he’d forgotten how badly one could ache after a ride with Ilisidi.

There was, however, the suffering of the boy from Dur, who now rode with inexpert desperation and, being taller, leaned more, with a more committed center of gravity.

The boy from Dur fell off, and fortunately held to the harness on his way down.

The dowager kept going, as Bren reined in, as the boy’s mechieta tried to keep going, as Banichi and one of Ilisidi’s men reined in and Jago went on with Jase, who had no success stopping Janari at all: if the herd was going, Jase was going.

“Bren!” Jase called back in alarm, as if he were being kidnapped.

The boy from Dur meanwhile proved that one of atevi weight and from a standing start (or from upside down with one foot still in the bend of the mechieta’s neck and the other on the hither side of the beast, while hanging onto the saddle straps) could not leap or even crawl back into the saddle. To a likely devotee of television machimi, it was surely an embarrassment.

“I’d get off,” Banichi said dryly, as he, Bren, and Ilisidi’s man Haduni all watched from mechieta-back. “I’d make him kneel and get up from the ground.”

One suspected if anyone could dothe television trick, Banichi might, but the boy from Dur gave up his foothold on the mechieta’s neck and hopped to the ground, whereupon the mechieta decided he was through for the day and decided to wander off.

The boy was clearly mortified, took a swat with the riding crop while holding to the rein and the mechieta bolted, jerking the rein from the boy’s hand and flinging him flat.

Haduni rode after the mechieta, which was on its way to join the herd.

The boy nursed a sore palm and bowed and bowed again.

“I’m sorry, nandi. I’m very sorry.”

“Shouldn’t have hit him,” Banichi said. “That’s for running.”

“Yes, nadi.” The boy, a lord’s son, bowed, clearly in pain.

Meanwhile Haduni had caught the mechieta and brought it toward them.

Banichi tapped a strap on his mechieta’s saddle. “Hold and tuck up,” Banichi said, and that was something Bren had seen in the machimi, too. For the short distance they had to go, the boy held to the saddle strap while Banichi swung to the other side and counterbalanced, and they met Ilisidi’s man and the recovered mechieta.

Then the two men gave the boy a very quick lesson on how to get the mechieta’s attention with a tug on the rein, where to touch the crop to get it to kneel, how fast to get his foot into the stirrup, and how to use the animal’s momentum to settle on, with what tension of the rein. It was familiar stuff. And it was a good lesson, which the boy from Dur seemed to take very gratefully.

“Very much better, nandi,” Ilisidi’s man said.

“You have a chance,” was Banichi’s judgment, and they set off at a brisk clip toward the rest, who were now over the horizon of a land that didn’t look all that rolling. But it was. And the dowager, Jago, Jase, and the rest were as invisible as if they’d sunk into the sparse, gravel-set vegetation.

It wasn’t the only time they had to stop for the boy from Dur, whose mortification was complete when, at one such crisis, the mechieta led him a chase, body-length by body-length, as it grazed on the fine spring growth and the boy would almost lay hands on it only to have it move on.

There was laughter.

“Someone should help him, nadi,” Jase said, as if suggesting he should do it; but Bren shook his head. “They laugh. If they meant ill, they wouldn’t. If the boy laughed it would be graceless and impudent.”

“ Why?”

“Because, nadi, it would signal his mastery of the matter.” The mechieta eluded the boy another body-length, and the boy this time made a sprint for it. The mechieta, almost caught by surprise, bolted, and the boy went sprawling, clutching his leg. There was laughter at that, too, but fainter, and one of the men got down to see to the boy and another chased down the errant mechieta.

“Good try, boy,” the dowager said. “Bad timing.”

The boy, clearly in pain, bowed. “Thank you, nand’ dowager.” And limped over to the mechieta the man brought back for him. He properly had it kneel, had it hold the posture, the lesson of his last fall, and got on with dignity.

“Good,” Ilisidi said shortly, and Bren guessed there was—if not devotion forming in a young atevi heart, for atevi reasons: man’chi would determine that—at least a knowledge that respect could be won from her.

As good as a ribbon, that was. A badge of honor.

“Nandi,” the boy said, and bowed with a modern conservatism, not going so far as the arm-waving extravagance of the riders of such beasts on the television. He managed not to look foolish.

From Jase there was silence. If they were lucky, Bren said to himself, there was deep thought going on.

Midafternoon. There was one break for, as the atevi put it, necessity, at which they all dismounted (it was Banichi’s comment that in less civilized days they didn’t dismount at all) and went aside with two spades from the packs, men to one side of a small rise, women to the other.

“Nadi,” Jase said in a faint, unhappy voice, “I can’t do this.”

“You’ll be terribly sorry in a few hours if you don’t,” Bren said with no remorse at all, and Jase reconsidered his options and went and did what he had to do.